It’s late August and the sun is already hanging low in the sky… In the wee hours crickets chirp and the morning chorus of songbirds is gone for another year.
And the red dragons fly around in the grass, as if they owned the place:
Last Saturday my wife went to her high school reunion in the small northern Michigan town where she was raised. I agreed to go along, but having been to these class reunions before I decided to just spend the day knocking about the countryside, looking for places to photograph. I didn’t’ know it at the time, but I was in for a real treat…
My wife was attending the reunion with her lifelong friend, and her friend’s father owns a working farm about 20 miles out of town. He offered to show me a more wild area of the farm - an area left for deer hunting in the fall, where beavers have dammed up a small creek and made a little pond in a low place.
I followed him out into the Newaygo County countryside. A ways out he turned onto a small two-track leading back into some fields. The road cut into a small wooded area and then ended at the edge of a hay field, a few weeks past its last mowing. We then drove directly across the field, through one low laying area near the beaver pond, and into a small field, also a few weeks past cutting. That’s where we stopped - and where I stayed for several hours.
Here’s a pano of the field where I spent the afternoon - click here for a much larger view. (This is made from 9 stitched together hand-held shots taken with a Nikon P6000.)
And here is a shot of the beaver pond… The pond straddles the boundary with a neighboring farm, and a barbed wire fence - not really visible in the web-sized image here - runs through the middle of it:
The field inthe pano is visible in this shot of the pond - it is the small area in the upper center of the fram, just above the pond and to the right of the large, dark mass of trees.
The owner of the farm went on his way after leading me back to this place. After a few minutes I spotted lots of dragonflies and other interesting subjects, and decided to start shooting. It has been some time since I found red meadowhawks in abundance, but I found a lot of them here. Here are a couple shots of Whitefaced Meadowhawks:
It is virtually impossible to identify most meadowhawks from photos - or even from casual observation - so I don’t know what this one is, but his bright red face is striking:
Here are two more unidentified red males:
And of course - for every male there is a female, more or less. Here are three females (or immature males) who retain a yellow-brown coloration:
And lastly a close-up of a summer coneflower:
It was a fabulous place to visit and I really enjoyed spending some very quiet hours out in the fields.